SRV Ron

Started KSP 025 Career in hard mode. The basic orbiter for the orbit contract. And in orbit. One more SRB and a additional fuel can under the third stage and the design will do Mun orbit. Can probably do a flyby return 8 as is.

A good test of your ability to docking is to get two ships together orbiting Mun that were launched from Kerbal. Then, you will be able to do a docking much easier as the hard part is syncing the orbit of both ships. Do all maneuvers slowly for best fuel efficiency. Neither ship was designed for docking, this was just a test for orbital intercept. As for landing on Mun, use the navball as your guide for killing drifting. Don't steer with RCS, use the WSAD keys to tilt the ship into the retrograde marker and follow it as it changes until you can get it directly vertical. Some is acceptable at the low descent rate prior to touchdown.

You should have removed all fuel first for the test.

Much more capable lander for returning samples. (Can be cut to 4 SRBs but landing on Mun more critical.) Mun Lander using Stayputnik;

Look for that huge impact crater West of KSP if you want to see an example of a similar past event. Play with hyper-edit at your own pearl of inviting the Krackin and destroying the game. As far as the Earth, the present moon was the result of a glancing impact by a Mars size planet very early in it's history. For a Gilly size object, the extinction of the Dinosaurs was the result, the crater in the Gulf of Mexico.

The command pod on top is notoriously unstable at speed in the lower atmosphere due to aerodynamics. It will need extra SAS control and or fins to stabilize. Turn slowly or expect it to swap ends quickly. The two test rockets below tests this out, the left one is stable in flight, the right one needed fins to stabilize the second stage.

From the pic above, those boosters didn't attach to the decouplers. They will stick out much further on that style of decoupler. And, you will need to brace them since the decoupler isn't strong enough to handle the power from that large booster. The photo below shows how much standoff you will get with this five booster design example. (A special trick was used to activate five part symmetry.)

If your lander is as overpowered as this, you need to pulse the engine at the lowest power setting and watch that your decent speed doesn't slow down too quickly.

Each of these ships have their own control pod. However, you can only control one at a time. You will also lose any ship that strays more then 2.5 k while in the lower atmosphere.

SRBs in real life cannot be gimbled. They can be steered some using graphite veins mounted in the exhaust blast.

Minmus, that moon of Green Cheese. It's large flat seas are easy to land on as well as the plateaus. If your ship can reach and land on Mun, it can do so easier on Minmus.

Last Night's experiment using KW Rocketry and Nova Punch mods to find the ideal combo of fuel cans and booster engine. Payload is a second stage with a one Kerbal pod.

More testing using NovaPunch and KW Rocketry came up with this highly efficient SSTO with a payload of the second stage. Launch weight 56.43 tons. Orbit 15.22 tons. No parts dropped off other then launch clamps. Staging set to allow main engine to power up before launching.

Using the turbojet and the right design, you should be able to get your speed up to 2200+ and climbing by burnout. That will take a precise flight profile to do that as well as give you an apogee of 100+K. From there, a small rocket burn will place your ship into orbit. This hybrid two stage will reach Mun and back. As a SSTO, it will easily go into orbit, but, only if you fly the high speed run carefully. Otherwise, you get excessive overheating in the air, or flame out going too slow to orbit efficiently.

Here is my Sandbox design for a 3 man payload with service module fully fueled in orbit. Mass 24.85 tons. Nova Punch, KW Rocketry, and Stock were used to design the conventional design rocket. The 2 stage launch vehicle with escape tower. Mass 181.87 tons At 5K ready for the orbital turn. Speed is ideal and at full throttle. Note, the stock NASA has the right amount of power for this design. 10K orbital turn in progress. Careful not to turn too fast or this design will flip ends at this stage of the flight. Ready to stage. When staging takes place, the escape tower is jettisoned as well. In orbit. Note, the second stage placed the 24.85 ton payload into a 100+K orbit with fuel to spare. Orbital stats. Payload in orbit ready to do further exploration and testing. As the Odin heat shield comes with retro rockets, it can be used to deorbit the pod. Reentry and landing;

For while in flight testing, I use a liquid fueled rocket that can be fueled and controlled to reach the required speed and altitude for the test. The entire vehicle is recovered in a splashdown landing. Later testing has used a jet or turbojet design also fully recoverable at splashdown. The turbojet design is capable of suborbital flight with small test payloads. Splashdown test only require a tweaked down SRB to send the payload to a water landing. The design is cheap and fully recoverable. Most engine test don't require any fuel for the test themselves. I was able to do five orbital test contracts, including reach orbit, in one flight and recover all the tested items in a splash down near the launch pad. Note, some test, such as test the abort escape system, require you to use the Run Test option instead of staging. There will be a note to inform you of such a requirement in the contract.

In Sandbox; Kerbal School of Hard Knocks. Ideal design is two stages to orbit or three stage to Kerbal escape. 1. Build your payload 2. Build the orbital insertion stage and test fly it. 3. Tweak the design as needed. 4. Add the core stage and test fly that. 5. Tweak the design as needed. 6. Use SRBs for the initial launch to lift the rocket to between 5,000 and 10,000 meters aiming for a speed over 200m/sec. Adjust their number and power output to reach that goal. 10,000 meters at about 240m/sec would be ideal for allowing the second stage to reach low orbit. 7. Tweak the second stage design so that it has the performance to place the third stage and payload into orbital insertion range. An optional design should be capable of a 75k payload orbit but is not critical. 8. Tweak the third stage design to have sufficient performance to place the payload into a 100K orbit with a comfortable reserve for recovery if desired. An optional design would have enough fuel left to push the payload to Kerbal escape. 9. Don't overbuild the launch vehicle. If it takes nearly all the thrust just to lift the boosters off the ground by themselves or you have excessive acceleration on the first 10,000 meters, you are just wasting resources. 10. Asparagus or onion designs, while not always desirable, are most efficient because all the engines are working to lift the payload to orbit during flight. They get staged when their fuel cans are empty and they are no longer needed to lift full fuel tanks for the rest of the design.

The inbetween time is good for doing contracts, exploring Mun and Minmus for all its science, and refining the fleet of ships that will be used for exploration when those windows become available.

The ship was designed for the Duna, Ike, Eve exploration contract.The SRBs are turned down some for best performance during launch. If you fly this for direct intercept of Duna or Eve and use aerobraking to get into orbit, you will have more then enough fuel left for a controlled landing using parachutes. The smaller cheaper design works well for the Mun, Minmus contract and can return to orbit to do additional data request contracts. My probe tipped over on Mun due to landing on a slope. However, it remained undamaged and was able to fulfill its contract.

Installed the updated Nova Punch for 24.2. Found it contains contracts for testing Nova Punch parts.

That amount would be based upon a direct intercept from Kerban at the point where Moho crosses the Orbital Plane. Those windows are far more rare then 30 days.

Yippee! Not only is there an updated NovaPunch mod posted there, that mod also includes testing contracts for its parts in Career.

To prevent that issue, strut in pairs top and, or bottom. Or, for a ring of SRBs strut in a ring top and bottom. Single strut from the top will also work if centered to the SRB.

In addition, you can install multiple copies on the same computer. That is useful if you want to play with mods such as Alternate Kerbal or Real Solar System that make major changes in how the game plays.

And, you are limited to flying to Mun as well as you are only allowed to have three flights at one time.